We are connected today in more ways than ever before. Not only do we access the digital world via our personal computers or mobile phones, but as we’re adopting connected devices at an increasing rate, the digital world governs our lives.

These changes and the growth in the use of digital technologies offer great opportunities across all business sectors to the benefit of society as a whole. Governments and industry alike have embraced digital transformation to improve their products and services, however, with this opportunity they also face a major challenge: how to secure the digital world from cyber threats. As the digital world expands, so does the attack surface and the risk of harm from hackers, criminals, and hostile actors.

The UK Government understand the threats that this raises, therefore, across many of their digital strategies and consultations, security is an ever-present feature. The Integrated Review for instance highlights that for UK to become the cyber power it seeks to be, cyber security is the foundation.

Nonetheless, cyber security as it currently exists, the constant arms race of monitoring and patching of vulnerabilities against exploitation, is unsustainable. For that reason, we need to ensure the digital world is secure by default and by design including at the hardware level. The UK’s National Cyber Strategy recognises this need and therefore includes a technology pillar to focus on more secure hardware with a significant part dedicated to UK Research and Innovation’s Digital Security by Design Programme (DSbD). The Government also reference this approach as part of the National Semiconductor Strategy with a push towards expanding international outreach to ensure the challenge of supporting new technology to adoption is supported globally.

Many industry sectors that embrace digital transformation recognise the need for better security. The UK’s Energy Digitalisation Strategy for instance highlights that to increase reliance on connected energy systems we need to ensure robust security and privacy and that security should be embedded into systems by design. This view is now becoming common place across all sectors where the integrity of a system is required for safety, privacy and resilience of operation. To embed this across all sectors, meant starting at the computer design level – something that hadn’t fundamentally changed in terms of security for over 50 years despite been widely reported, and increasingly suffering the consequences of such lacking.

Digital security is a global challenge and as the semiconductor strategy highlights, the DSbD Programme’s international outreach will be expanded by UK Government to promote the need for adoption of the technology that has been developed. Already, joint guidance from an international collaboration from the US, UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand advise the move towards more secure by design technologies such as those developed in the DSbD programme.

Within Government, we want to help support and create a new ecosystem for people using and adopting this new technology and help UK businesses overcome any commercial or performance barriers to improving the security of their projects. Our National Cyber Strategy 2022 is to make the UK into a leading global cyber power.”

– Andrew Elliot, Deputy Director, Cyber Security at Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) London